The dance of death

It takes a visionary artist to transform a dance film into a sublime celluloid experience that stands alone. Fortunately the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s performance of Dracula provided the perfect basis for a silent film. Canadian Director Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) sets the ballet within a melange of silent film imagery that unfolds like a dream sequence. Maddin, who is best known for his surreal reworkings of vintage aesthetics and silent films harking back to the 1920s and ’30s, has merged theatre, film and ballet to create a phantasmagoric experience for ballet and Dracula lovers alike.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary incorporates the choreography of Mark Godden, a diverse legacy of film imagery and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. The Royal Winnipeg’s ballerinas also prevail as cast members in this production. Principal dancer Tara Birtwhistle plays Lucy Westenra, whose desires are unleashed by the jealous, handsome Chinese goth Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang) – who, in this version, is an immigrant from the east. Elements of pantomime dominate the first half of the film, before giving way to dance scenes that immerse us in the lyricism of the story. Lucy’s pas de deux with Dracula is the most sensual dance-with-death I’ve seen – forget about Halloween parties. The second half sees Mina (Cindy Marie-Small) pursued by Dracula in a seductively savage ballet filled with stake-wielding henchman. This is where the film’s eroticism and Grand Guignol style of horror are brought to the fore.

The cinematography gives tremendous depth to the set of Castle Dracula, which come alive with the shadows and haunting figures that lurk within Gustav Mahler’s nocturnes. Maddin used Super 8 and 16mm film and devices such as vaseline lenses, triple exposure, tinting, animation and title overlays to replicate the golden era of cinema’s staging of melodrama in expressionistic settings (in this case, a mansion Jean Cocteau would be at home in).

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary works well precisely because it is silent: Maddin is used to focusing on the intensity of actors’ faces in the absence of sound to tell a story; large parts of the film are expressed through ballet and Maddin’s felicity of style gives it the intensity and beauty it deserves.